by Harlan Coben
“You told me you moved into this house shortly after Anita disappeared. How did a widow from Newark afford it? You told me that your son worked his way through Yale Law School. Sorry, but part-time jobs do not pay that kind of money anymore.”
“So?”
He kept the gun trained on her. “You knew Horace wasn’t Brenda’s father from the beginning, didn’t you? Anita was your closest friend. You were still working at the Bradfords’ home. You must have known.”
She did not back down. “And what if I did?”
“Then you knew Anita ran away. She would have confided in you. And if she had run into a problem at the Holiday Inn, she would have called you, not Horace.”
“Could be,” Mabel said. “If you’re talking hypothetically, I guess this is all possible.”
Myron pressed the gun against her forehead, pushing her onto the couch. “Did you kill Anita for the money?”
Mabel smiled. Physically it was that same celestial smile, but now Myron thought he could see at least a hint of the decay looming beneath it. “Hypothetically, Myron, I guess I could have a bunch of motives. Money, yes—fourteen thousand dollars is a lot of money. Or sisterly love—Anita was going to leave Horace brokenhearted, right? She was going to take away the baby girl he thought was his. Maybe she was even going to tell Horace the truth about Brenda’s father. And maybe Horace would know that his only sister had helped keep the secret all those years.” She glared up at the gun. “Lots of motives, I’ll give you that.”
“How did you do it, Mabel?”
“Go home, Myron.”
Myron lifted the muzzle and poked her forehead with it. Hard. “How?”
“You think I’m scared of you?”
He poked her again with the muzzle. Harder. Then again. “How?”
“What do you mean, how?” She was spitting words now. “It would have been easy, Myron. Anita was a mother. I would have quietly shown her the gun. I would have told her if she didn’t do exactly as I said, I would kill her daughter. So Anita, the good mother, would have listened. She would have given her daughter a last hug and told her to wait in the lobby. I would have used a pillow to muffle the shot. Simple, no?”
A fresh flash of rage surged through him. “Then what happened?”
Mabel hesitated. Myron hit her with the gun again.
“I drove Brenda back to her house. Anita had left a note telling Horace she was running away and that Brenda wasn’t his child. I tore it up and wrote another.”
“So Horace never even knew that Anita had planned on taking Brenda.”
“That’s right.”
“And Brenda never said anything?”
“She was five years old, Myron. She didn’t know what was going on. She told her daddy how I picked her up and took her away from Mommy. But she didn’t remember anything about a hotel. At least that’s what I thought.”
Silence.
“When Anita’s body vanished, what did you think happened?”
“I figured that Arthur Bradford had shown up, found her dead, and did what that family always did: threw out the trash.”
Another rage flash. “And you found a way to use that. With your son, Terence, and his political career.”
Mabel shook her head. “Too dangerous,” she said. “You don’t want to stir up those Bradford boys with blackmail. I had nothing to do with Terence’s career. But truth be told, Arthur was always willing to help Terence. Terence was, after all, his daughter’s cousin.”
The anger swelled, pressing against his skull. He wanted so much simply to pull the trigger and end this. “So what happened next?”
“Oh, come now, Myron. You know the rest of the story, don’t you? Horace started looking for Anita again. After all these years. He had a lead, he said. He thought he could find her. I tried to talk him out of it, but, well, love is a funny thing.”
“Horace found out about the Holiday Inn,” Myron said.
“Yes.”
“He spoke to a woman named Caroline Gundeck.”
Mabel shrugged. “I never heard the woman’s name.”
“I just woke Ms. Gundeck out of a sound sleep,” Myron said. “Scared her half to death. But she talked to me. Just like she talked to Horace. She was a maid back then, and she knew Anita. You see, Anita used to work hotel functions to make a little extra money. Caroline Gundeck remembered seeing Anita there that night. She was surprised because Anita checked in as a guest, not a worker. She also remembered seeing Anita’s little daughter. And she remembered seeing Anita’s daughter leave with another woman. A strung-out drug addict is how she described the woman. I wouldn’t have guessed it was you. But Horace would have.”
Mabel Edwards said nothing.
“Horace figured it out after hearing that. So he came charging over here. Still in hiding. Still with all that money on him—eleven grand. And he hit you. He got so angry that he punched you in the eye. And then you killed him.”
She shrugged again. “It almost sounds like self-defense.”
“Almost,” Myron agreed. “With Horace, it was easy. He was on the run already. All you had to do was continue to make it look like he was in hiding. He would be a black man on the run, not a homicide. Who would care? It was like Anita all over again. All these years you did the little things to make people think she was still alive. You wrote letters. You faked phone calls. Whatever. So you decided to do the same again. Hell, it worked once, right? But the problem was, you weren’t as good at getting rid of the dead as Sam.”
“Sam?”
“The man who worked for the Bradfords,” Myron said. “My guess is that Terence helped you move the bodies.”
She smiled. “Don’t underestimate my strength, Myron. I’m not helpless.”
He nodded. She was right. “I keep giving you these other motives, but my guess is that it was mostly about money. You got fourteen thousand from Anita. You got eleven thousand from Horace. And your own husband, dear, sweet Roland whose picture you wept over, had an insurance policy, I’d bet.”
She nodded. “Only five thousand dollars, poor soul.”
“But enough for you. Shot in the head near his very own home. No witnesses. And the police had arrested you three times the previous year—twice for petty theft and once for drug possession. Seems your downward spiral began before Roland was killed.”
Mabel sighed. “Are we done now?”
“No,” he said.
“I think we covered everything, Myron.”
He shook his head. “Not Brenda.”
“Oh, right, of course.” She leaned back a bit. “You seem to have all the answers, Myron. Why did I kill Brenda?”
“Because,” Myron said, “of me.”
Mabel actually smiled. He felt his finger tighten on the trigger.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
Mabel just kept smiling.
“As long as Brenda didn’t remember the Holiday Inn, she wasn’t a threat. But I was the one who told you about our visit there. I was the one who told you she was having memories. And that’s when you knew you had to kill her.”
She just kept smiling.
“And with Horace’s body found and Brenda already a murder suspect, your job became easier. Frame Brenda and make her disappear. You kill two birds with one stone. So you planted the gun under Brenda’s mattress. But again you had trouble getting rid of the body. You shot her and dumped her in the woods. My guess is that you planned on coming back another day when you had more time. What you didn’t count on was the search party finding her so soon.”
Mabel Edwards shook her head. “You sure can spin a tale, Myron.”
“It’s not a tale. We both know that.”
“And we both know you can’t prove any of this.”
“There will be fibers, Mabel. Hairs, threads, something.”
“So what?” Again her smile poked his heart like a pair of knitting needles. “You saw me hug my niece right here in this very room. If her body has fibers or threads,
they’d be from that. And Horace visited me before he was murdered. I told you that. So maybe that’s how he got hairs or fibers on him—if they even found any.”
A hot bolt of fury exploded inside his head, almost blinding him. Myron pressed the barrel hard against her forehead. His hand started quaking. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“How did you get Brenda to leave practice?”
She didn’t blink. “I said I’d found her mother.”
Myron closed his eyes. He tried to hold the gun steady. Mabel stared at him.
“You won’t shoot me, Myron. You’re not the kind of man who shoots a woman in cold blood.”
He didn’t pull the gun away.
Mabel reached up with her hand. She pushed the barrel away from her face. Then she got up, tightened her robe, and walked away.
“I’m going to bed now,” she said. “Close the door on your way out.”
He did close the door.
He drove back to Manhattan. Win and Esperanza were waiting for him. They did not ask him where he’d been. And he did not tell them. In fact, he never told them.
He called Jessica’s loft. The machine answered. When the beep sounded, he said that he planned on staying with Win for a while. He didn’t know for how long. But awhile.
Roy Pomeranz and Eli Wickner were found dead in the cabin two days later. An apparent murder-suicide. Livingstonites speculated, but no one ever knew what had driven Eli over the edge. The Eli Wickner Little League backstop was immediately renamed.
Esperanza went back to work at MB SportsReps. Myron did not.
The homicides of Brenda Slaughter and Horace Slaughter remain unsolved.
Nothing that happened at Bradford Farms that night was ever reported. A publicist for the Bradford campaign confirmed that Chance Bradford had recently undergone knee surgery to repair a nagging tennis injury. He was recovering nicely.
Jessica did not return the phone message.
And Myron told only one person about his final meeting with Mabel Edwards.
SEPTEMBER 15
Two Weeks Later
The cemetery overlooked a schoolyard.
There is nothing as heavy as grief. Grief is the deepest pit in the blackest ocean, the bottomless ravine. It is all-consuming. It suffocates. It paralyzes as no severed nerve could.
He spent much time here now.
Myron heard footsteps coming up behind him. He closed his eyes. It was as he expected. The footsteps came closer. When they stopped, Myron did not turn around.
“You killed her,” Myron said.
“Yes.”
“Do you feel better now?”
Arthur Bradford’s tone caressed the back of Myron’s neck with a cold, bloodless hand. “The question is, Myron, do you?”
He did not know.
“If it means anything to you, Mabel Edwards died slowly.”
It didn’t. Mabel Edwards had been right that night: He was not the type to shoot a woman in cold blood. He was worse.
“I’ve also decided to quit the gubernatorial race,” Arthur said. “I’m going to try to remember how I felt when I was with Anita. I’m going to change.”
He wouldn’t. But Myron didn’t care.
Arthur Bradford left then. Myron stared at the mound of dirt for a while longer. He lay down next to it and wondered how something so splendid and alive could be no more. He waited for the school’s final bell, and then he watched the children rush out of the building like bees from a poked hive. Their squeals did not comfort him.
Clouds began to blot the blue, and then rain began to fall. Myron almost smiled. Yes, rain. That was fitting. Much better than the earlier clear skies. He closed his eyes and let the drops pound him—rain on the petals of a crushed rose.
Eventually he stood and trekked down the hill to his car. Jessica was there, looming before him like a translucent specter. He had not seen or spoken to her in two weeks. Her beautiful face was wet—from the rain or tears, he could not say.
He stopped short and looked at her. Something else inside him shattered like a dropped tumbler.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Myron said.
Jessica nodded. “I know.”
He walked away from her then. Jessica stood and watched him in silence. He got in his car and turned the ignition. Still, she did not move. He started driving, keeping his eye on the rearview mirror. The translucent specter grew smaller and smaller. But it never totally disappeared.
In memory of my parents,
Corky and Carl Coben
and in celebration of their grandchildren,
Charlotte, Aleksander, Benjamin, and Gabrielle
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book alone. Nobody helped me. But if mistakes were made, I wish to keep in the long-standing American tradition of passing the buck. So with that in mind, the author would like to thank the following wonderful people: Aaron Priest, Lisa Erbach Vance, and everyone at the Aaron Priest Literary Agency; Carole Baron, Leslie Schnur, Jacob Hoye, Heather Mongelli, and everyone at Dell Publishing; Maureen Coyle of the New York Liberty; Karen Ross, ME of the Dallas County Institute of Forensic Science; Peter Roisman of Advantage International; Sergeant Jay Vanderbeck of the Livingston Police Department; Detective Lieutenant Keith Killion of the Ridgewood Police Department; Maggie Griffin, James Bradbeer, Chip Hinshaw, and of course, Dave Bolt. Again I repeat: any errors—factual or otherwise—are totally the fault of these people. The author is not to blame.
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1999 by Harlan Coben
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.
Dell® is registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48481-9
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Contents
Master - Table of Contents
The Final Detail
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
Myron lay sprawled next to a knee-knockingly gorgeous brunette clad only in a Class-B-felony bikini, a tropical drink sans umbrella in one hand, the aqua clear Caribbean water lapping at his feet, the sand a dazzling white powder, the sky a pure blue that could only be God�
��s blank canvas, the sun as soothing and rich as a Swedish masseur with a snifter of cognac, and he was intensely miserable.
The two of them had been on this island paradise for, he guessed, three weeks. Myron had not bothered counting the days. Neither, he imagined, had Terese. The island seemed as remote as Gilligan’s—no phone, some lights, no motorcar, plenty of luxury, not much like Robinson Crusoe, and well, not as primitive as can be either. Myron shook his head. You can take the boy out of the television, but you can’t take the television out of the boy.
At the horizon’s midway point, slicing toward them and ripping a seam of white in the aqua-blue fabric, came the yacht. Myron saw it, and his stomach clenched.
He did not know where they were exactly, though the island did indeed have a name: St. Bacchanals. Yes, for real. It was a small patch of planet, owned by one of those mega-cruise lines that used one side of the island for passengers to swim and barbecue and enjoy a day on their “own personal island paradise.” Personal. Just them and the other twenty-five hundred turistas squeezed onto a short stretch of beach. Yep, personal, bacchanal-like.
This side of the island, however, was quite different. There was only this one home, owned by the cruise line’s CEO, a hybrid between a thatched hut and a plantation manor. The only person within a mile was a servant. Total island population: maybe thirty, all of whom worked as caretakers hired by the cruise line.
The yacht shut off its engine and drifted closer.
Terese Collins lowered her Bolle sunglasses and frowned. In three weeks no vessel except the mammoth cruise liners—they had subtle names like the Sensation or the Ecstasy or the G Spot—had ambled past their stretch of sand.